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January 14, 2009

ECI: For Carriers and ISPs, Optical Fiber and Broadband Wireless Each Has Its Place

By Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communications Group



Just as the notion of “WiMAX (News - Alert) vs. LTE” is something of a misnomer, so too is the idea that optical fiber and broadband wireless are necessarily always competitors. In fact, the quick, inexpensive setup and tremendous reach of broadband wireless can complement the solid, super-high bandwidth capabilities of optical fiber.

 
In this conversation with ECI Telecom’s Ron Levin, we see that, like everything else in the next generation network, hybridization is the norm and different technologies can be brought to bear where they make the most sense.
 
ECI Telecom (News - Alert) supplies networking infrastructure for carrier and service provider networks worldwide. ECI’s solutions serve five distinct markets: Incumbent and competitive telecom carriers; Wireless/Cellular service providers; Multiple Service Operators – cable operators and their increasingly wide range of communications services; Utilities/“Carriers of Carriers” – companies with networks that serve as backbones for other carriers; and Government/Defense – organizations that need a secure communications infrastructure for their large enterprise networks.
  
The company has a particular strength in GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) technology, a point-to-multipoint network architecture that’s an evolution of the Broadband BPON standard. ECI claims it is the only vendor to offer integrated GPON, xDSL, Gigabit Ethernet and ATM aggregation, cellular UMTS backhauling, and voice services all on a unified management platform. Furthermore, its point-to-multipoint architecture doesn’t require individual fibers for each point; one single port supports up to 128 FTTH users.
 
Levin, ECI’s Associate Vice President of Product Marketing, says that he doesn’t see optical fiber and broadband wireless really competing with each other.
 
“It’s not ‘either/or.’ It depends on the situation and at ECI we’re players in both the optical fiber world, mostly around GPON, but we also make a substantial portion of our revenues from wireless backhaul,” Levin said. “But let’s talk about mobile broadband for a moment. If you’re in a situation where you as a carrier or service provider want to provide broadband connectivity fairly quickly at relatively low cost over a geographic area, then wireless broadband is probably the way to go.”
 
And that’s exactly what ECI is seeing in places such as India, in the former Soviet Union countries and places in Asia, Latin America and Africa where local companies want to establish coverage very quickly and economically, Levin said.
 
In those cases, it doesn’t have to be very high bandwidth or carry IPTV (News - Alert) or any of the triple play services. Instead, you just want to get that voice connection up and running, and maybe move some data out to the field as a fast as possible.
 
“We’ve had a lot of success with mobile backhaul in India precisely because of this reasoning,” Levin said. “India is rolling out mobile networks like you wouldn’t believe. It’s huge.”
 
At the other extreme, he said, if your goal is to provide services such as IPTV and/or other high bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth services such as gaming and other video type services, then you may find that wireless broadband just can’t handle that today.
 
Once it’s deployed, LTE (News - Alert) will theoretically deliver 100 megabits per second, but in real life that’s not going to occur, according to Levin. In such situations you must find or build a good fixed line to the subscriber and that now almost always involves a fiber connection. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve fiber to the home, but you have to come very close with the fiber, either to the neighborhood street cabinet, or the building basement, to provide sufficient bandwidth over the remaining copper loop to the subscriber.
 
Between these two extremes are situations where you must make difficult choices or employ a mix of the two technologies, Levin said.
 
For example, if you’re rolling out a broadband network to a large city in India, you might have very high density or high paying neighborhoods that you must serve with fiber connections, and lower-paying or distant locations where you’re simply trying to establish connectivity and so you resort to wireless broadband.
 
“Point-to-point radio links can bring the backhaul traffic back to a base station where it encounters fiber leading back to the main network,” Levin said. “So in many cases you may end up with a mix of the two, a hybrid network. But there are particularly hard-to-reach places where you have to rely totally on wireless backhaul. For example, in the Alps in France they use WiMAX for backhaul and we actually have a deployment in Denmark with a utilities company called ELRO Amba that is running a WiMAX network and some cases they do the backhaul over an optical network from ECI and in other places they do it over point-to-point microwave. ELRO selected our SR9700 Series of Carrier Ethernet Switch Routers to be deployed as part of its nationwide WiMAX network.”
 

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Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group. To read more of Richard’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan


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